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How-To Geek

One of our favorite readers wrote in today asking how to tell if his Word 2007 installation was running Service Pack 1, since he couldn’t find the About dialog, which got me thinking… I bet most people don’t know where it is!

So Jeff, this article is for you, but hopefully it will help somebody else as well. This same method should work for all Office applications: Word, Excel, Access, and all the rest.

First click on the Office button in the upper left-hand corner.

Now click the Word Options button in the menu (or Excel options for Excel, etc)

Select the Resources tab on the left-hand pane, and then you’ll see “about Microsoft Office Word 2007” in the list.

You can click on the About button to bring up About dialog… and look, I’m running SP1 and didn’t even realize it.

Comments (23)

And for those that really want easy access to this in the future, you can always customize the “Quick Access Tab” by adding a button for the “About” page. Not sure why you would want to do this, but it’s something you could do. A previous post covered how-to Save Time by Customizing the Quick Access Toolbar. The “About” option is available in the list of commands for “Commands Not in the Ribbon”.

1. The About dialog was moved to a totally nondiscoverable place in Word 2007… I guessed my way to Word Options, but didn’t guess “Resources”. I never thought of the About box as an option or a resource.

2. The most reliable way to find where it moved to was to Google “Word 2007 about dialog” which took me to this page. The built-in “Help” feature of Word (which I rarely use, but found with the blue ‘?’ icon) was totally useless. I could not find a set of search terms that would even include the right answer among the top 25 potential answers. I’m not sure how the relevancy ranking is supposed to work but it is totally broken.

It was actually faster to switch over to the Mac, boot up Firefox, and Google for the answer than it was to even launch the built-in Help dialog and perform the search there from within Word. And the former has the distinct advantage of producing a useful answer.

Thanks for posting this info. This was pretty much impossible to find otherwise. Something so simple, made so inobvious. I hate the ribbon bar– it is not more intuitive. It is more cumbersome. Clearly 1 step forward, 2 or more steps back.

The location of the about dialog makes no sense to me. It is not a configurable option, nor is it related to saving or otherwise modifying my document. I truly wonder what motivated Microsoft to place it into the configuration dialog thingy.

Office 2007 is such a horrible update. I really wish my company wouldn’t have forced this pile on us. Oh well, guess they get to pay for all the time wasted trying to figure out such important things as how to access the “about” dialog. So much for the “you can still use the old keyboard commands to access to the old menu items” argument for this ridiculous ribbon thing.

And GMTurner: I don’t have any “About” option available under either “Commands Not in the Ribbon” or “All Commands”.

Office 2007 is such a horrible update. I really wish my company wouldn’t have forced this pile on us. Oh well, guess they get to pay for all the time wasted trying to figure out such important things as how to access the “about” dialog. So much for the “you can still use the old keyboard commands to access to the old menu items” argument for this ridiculous ribbon thing.

And GMTurner: I don’t have any “About” option available under either “Commands Not in the Ribbon” or “All Commands”.

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